I wish I'd played Heavy Rain on Easy because the gameplay sucked, but typically I'll do Hard because it gives the gameplay mechanics time to shine. AI is dumbed down on Easy, making it less interesting. Things stand there and take one bullet to die.

I don't want to be frustrated, but I want to be challenged. Plenty of games don't even do that on Hard (looking at you, Dishonored and Saints Row 3.)

For BioShock, though? The whole respawn mechanic kills challenge, anyway. There was a point in one of the games, I think 2, where a Big Daddy kept killing me, and I had little ammo. Fortunately he was standing right outside the respawn tank. I could just shoot him, take out about 10% of his health before dying, then start again with barely any movement.

At that point the game loses challenge, anyway. Yeah, sure, you get to see better AI and have to be more creative in your fighting (the latter part is really the key, as you can't just use the same attack repetitively), but I agree with everyone that claims BioShock got tedious towards the end. I just wanted to see the end of the story, but I was tired of the gameplay. I think the respawn points taking away any and all challenge were responsible for that. At that point I probably should have gone down to easy as the challenge was gone and there was nothing new to see other than plot.